1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to modulation of the immune system. More particularly, the invention relates to modulating the immune system through the use of oligonucleotide-derived compounds.
2. Summary of the Related Art
Tokunaga et al, J. Natl. Cancer Inst. 72:955-962 (1984); Messina et al., J. Immunol. 147: 1759-1764 (1991); Krieg et al., Nature 374: 546-549 (1995); Sato et al, Science 273: 352-354 (1996), teach that the presence of CpG dinucleotides in certain sequence contexts in bacterial and synthetic oligodeoxyribonucleotides (CpG DNAs) are known to activate vertebrate innate immune reaction, T-cells and B cells.
Yamamoto et al., Jpn. J. Cancer Res. 79: 866-873 (1988); Halpern et al., Cell Immunol., 167: 72-78 (1996); Klinman et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93: 2879-2883 (1996); Zhao et al., Antisense Nucleic Acid Drug Dev. 7: 495-502 (1997) teach that the activation of immune cells by CpG DNA induces secretion of a number of cytokines, including IFN-γ, IL-12, TNF-α, and IL-6, and stimulates expression of costimulatory surface molecules.
Krieg et al., supra; Yamamoto et al, J. Immunol. 148; 4072-4076 (1992); Tokunaga et al., Microbiol. Immunol. 36: 55-66 (1992); Liang et al., J. Clin. Invest. 98: 1119-1129 (1996); Hartmann et al., J. Immunol. 164: 1617-1624 (2000), teach that the presence of a CpG dinucleotide and the sequences flanking the dinucleotide play a critical role in determining the immunostimulatory activity of DNA, that CpG dinucleotides in palindromic or non-palindromic hexameric sequences (P1P2CGP3P4) are required for immune stimulation, and further, that PuPuCGPyPy and PuTCG motifs optimally activate murine and human immune systems, respectively.
While these findings demonstrate that oligonucleotides are useful as immune stimulating agents, some problems with such use still exist. For example, long oligonucleotides are expensive to make and species specificity of flanking sequences limits the breadth of utility of any given oligonucleotide. There is, therefore, a need for less expensive immunostimulatory agents, and preferably immunostimulatory agents that have cross-species efficacy.